The Easter Effect

Very few marathons share the weekend with Easter, no matter what date the holiday falls on.

Whether you celebrate Easter or not, by now you've probably realized that the holiday is tomorrow. That house down the block has a giant inflatable bunny in the front yard, your favorite sandwich shop put up a sign saying they're closed, there's even more candy on display in the supermarket than at Halloween, and... there are no marathons on the calendar?

This weekend, according to MarathonGuide.com, there is only one marathon in the whole country – the Two River Marathon Race Festival, an event in northeastern Pennsylvania that had 17 finishers last year – and none on Sunday. That might not sound that strange, but take a minute to realize that this is prime spring marathon weather across much of the country. It's just warming up, but not too hot yet, so shouldn't there be more marathons on the calendar? Last year, when Easter fell on a different weekend, there were 11 marathons this last weekend in March. That's a pretty big difference.

And last year wasn't the only time this happened. In an attempt to visualize the Easter effect on marathons, I went back through ten years of results posted to MarathonGuide.com and, in every year except 2007, Easter weekend had the lowest number of marathons of any within a ten week period and, most years, by a significant margin. Of course, some marathons may not have reported results to the site, but even so, this gives us a fairly good look at the trend.

Because Easter can fall as early as March 22 and as late as April 25, plotting the number of marathons each week will just create a jumbled mess. So, to see what was happening on Easter, I set up a chart with the number of weeks before or after Easter as the horizontal axis. Week 0, for example, is Easter weekend. Week 1 is the week after, Week -1 is the week before.

You can definitely see a trend there – a dip each year on Easter weekend – but the jumble of colored lines still looks more like a colorful Easter egg than a useful chart. So, I combined the number of races from all ten years into one line. And, as expected, Easter weekend had the lowest number of marathons by a wide margin. There were only 29 marathons on that weekend over the ten year period, compared with 112 the week following Easter and 78 the week before.

Easter is one of the rare holidays that bounces around every year, so races are having to make a significant effort to dodge it, changing race dates when it falls on their traditional weekend. Marathon directors are likely (and understandably) concerned about the community problems that road closures on such a big church attendance day would cause, explaining the absence of road marathons on Easter Sunday. But why so few races on the Saturday before? And why no trail marathons on Sunday?

Many other holidays, notably Thanksgiving and Independence Day, have become very popular race dates in recent years. For those who are celebrating Easter with a big family meal, why not run a marathon first, and burn some calories like the turkey trotters do in November?

Would you ever run a marathon on Easter weekend? Or do you think that it's good that race directors avoid the holiday?